Temer ally voted new house speaker in Brazil

Brazil’s lower house of Congress elected an ally of interim president Michel Temer as its new speaker Thursday, replacing the embattled Eduardo Cunha, an architect of impeachment proceedings against suspended president Dilma Rousseff.

Rodrigo Maia of the right-wing Democrats party was elected with 285 out of 460 votes in a second-round election in the Chamber of Deputies.

That puts the 46-year-old banker first in line to succeed the president in Latin America’s largest economy.

After months of political upheaval, Temer, Rousseff’s vice president, took over from her on May 12, when the Senate suspended her to face an impeachment trial over accusations of fudging the government’s accounts to make them look better in an election year.

There is currently no vice president as Temer, the head of the center-right PMDB party, governs the country while Rousseff fights an impeachment push that political analysts give her little chance of surviving.

Cunha, a fellow PMDB member, resigned from the powerful speaker’s post a week ago under fire for allegedly taking millions of dollars in bribes and stashing money in secret Swiss accounts.

He had already been suspended from the job in May, just days before the impeachment vote he helped orchestrate.

Cunha, an inveterate backroom operator, is often called Brazil’s Frank Underwood, the dark, manipulative politician in the hit Netflix series “House of Cards.”

Critics say Cunha sought to use his power to trigger impeachment proceedings against Rousseff to save his own scandal-plagued career.

The suspended leftist president’s popularity had plunged amid a deep recession and an explosive corruption scandal at state oil giant Petrobras.

Maia called for dialogue in the deeply divided Congress as he took his post.

“We must bring peace to this plenary, dialogue with the majority and the minority,” he said.

Temer congratulated him and wished him success in a Twitter message.